Mugglestone - The Oxford History of English

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regular (‘weak’) verbs form their past tense and past participles in -ed (walk- walked-walked), irregular (‘strong’) verbs do so in a variety of ways which can see quite radical diVerences in two or all three of these positions (Wnd-found-found, come-came-come, write-wrote-written, and so on). The regularization tendency of the non-standard is such that some of the complexity can be avoided, either through the transforming of normally irregular verbs into regular ones or by uniting past tense and past participle (show-showed-showed illustrates both possibilities). But not all is blunt regularization. It might at Wrst sight appear that it is the former of these strategies, the change from irregular to regular, that creates catched as the non-standard variant of caught. (Catched has traditionally been found over most of England, with standard caught being found dominant in the south-east around London and signiWcantly in some coastal areas—such as east Yorkshire, Lincolnshire, Norfolk, south Devon, the Severn Estuary—which are readily connected to the capital by sea, a fact which incidentally provides an insight into how linguistic forms can be spread.) However, although there is complicating vowel-change here, caught, with its [t] ending, is clearly irregular like catched: in fact, these two past-tense forms have existed side by side in the language for a very long time, and neither seems more historically valid than the other. And just as catched might attract criticism as childish, so the falling together of the past tense and past participle of to come, which allows for such usage as She come to town last week, is likely to attract judgements of ignorance. However, this is similarly not merely a matter of simpliWcation: although they will be quite oblivious of the fact, the very many people who use come in this way have an Old English past-tense form, and so have pedigree on their side.

Syntax is also heavily subject to the normalizing eVect of the standard dialect, and non-standard variation in this area of grammar is as stigmatized as is that in word-grammar. It is to be expected that such variation will exist, of course, most strongly supported by those who do not feel themselves to be subject to social pressures. And variation at this level can be expected to have a social rather than a narrowly regional base, with widespread social implications as a consequence. Doubtless the best known feature of this kind is multiple negation, which sees the negative signalled twice or more within a construction: he didn’t never have none and the like. There is only small variation in the kinds of multiple negative constructions which are likely to be encountered from place to place, and no English-speaking region where none are found at all. Yet whilst the phenomenon is widespread geographically, and the writings of Chaucer and Shakespeare, amongst others, testify to its historicity, the taboo on breaking the rule that ‘two negatives make a positive’ which has been discussed in Chapter 9 remains strong, and such negation can have important social consequences for its users.

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whilst permitting their speakers Wne-tuning of meaning which is not available to standard dialect users, they oVer notable consistency where the standard is irregular; and they oVer to the communities who use them a very ready means by which to express individual and collective identity. Why, then, is so little credit aVorded to the non-standard? The answer seems in large part to rest with social, and with it regional, separation, at the level of which people are quite readily disposed to pass judgement on the speech of others, providing the kind of statistics presented above on attitudes to accents. Women in the Belfast community of Ballymacarrett, aware of the more acceptable pronunciation, are only half as likely to pronounce look as [lVk] as their male counterparts. A peripheral member of an adolescent gang in Reading, England, is reportedly one-third as likely to say I goes than is a core member, and will not use what as a relative pronoun when the leaders use it almost without fail.

Variants, then, far from being in free variation, available to be chosen at will, have social meaning, and the society we have inherited places store by what speakers select from the available forms. Social and economic progress in mainstream society is undeniably easier for those who consistently use the variants of grammar and vocabulary belonging to what, at the present time, we have agreed to recognize as the standard dialect, so-called ‘standard English’. And the nearer a speaker approaches to pronunciations of prestige, which in England are those of Received Pronunciation, the more acceptable their accent. Changing fashion over time ensures that the goalposts at which people aim will move, and indeed it is not hard to imagine that, as more people achieve mastery of particularly desirable language forms, those previously in possession of them will Wnd ways of moving the target to maintain their exclusivity. It has been suggested by some commentators, furthermore, that it is this desire to remain exclusive that has not only brought about past innovations but has hindered the acceptance into the standard of those regularizations which we have seen to be a feature of the non-standard: if the standard dialect is kept irregular, and so diYcult to attain, fewer people might be expected to achieve it than might otherwise be the case.

Whether or not one accepts this ‘conspiracy theory’ view of the tension between varieties of the language, it is clear that tension does exist, with the members of social groups within one locality, and the collective memberships of diVerent regional communities, interacting to share, or to emphasize as distinct, their own especial variants. Studying that variation today, we are provided with both a window on the past and a means by which we might better understand what has spurred English on to change over the centuries.

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detailed survey-derived data for Scotland from the middle of the twentieth century. Fieldwork data, with accompanying analysis, is provided for English in Wales by Parry (n.d. [1977], 1979, 1999). Dieth and Orton (1962) and Orton et al. (1962–71) give access to the very detailed raw data of the Survey of English Dialects, which covers the English counties and a small part of south-east Wales, whilst Upton et al. (1994), in drawing together its diVuse lexical and grammatical information, provides a digest and also acts as a thesaurus to the larger work. Extracts of recordings from the Survey, set alongside others from the Millennium Memory Bank project to aVord the possibility of real-time comparison of local speech at the midand end-points of the twentieth century, can be heard in the English Accents and Dialects collection of the British Library’s Collect Britain website <http://www.collectbritain.co.uk/collections/dialects/>, where accompanying notes are also provided. The website for the BBC’s Voices 2005 project may also be of interest: see <http://www.bbc.co.uk/voices/>. Some survey material for Ireland is available in Barry (1981, 1982), although this is brief and restricted in geographical range: Hickey (2004) gives the user access to very detailed and up-to-date information on Irish English.

The ‘dialect area’

A wide variety of atlases present the Wndings of the Survey of English Dialects cartographically: Orton and Wright (1974) and Orton et al. (1978) interpret much of the Survey’s data in map form; further SED mapping, using a wide range of techniques to highlight various issues of geographical distribution of features in England, and doing so with varying degrees of technical complexity, is available in Kolb (1979), Anderson (1987), Upton et al. (1987), Viereck with Ramisch (1991, 1997), and Upton and Widdowson (1996). Parry (1999) contains Survey of Anglo-Welsh Dialects maps directly in the tradition of Orton et al. (1978), and, since the SAWD data are directly comparable with those of SED, permits the mapping of features across the Wales– England border. It should be noted, however, that although a number of these atlases are isoglossic, the lines which they contain do not imply the existence of areas within which features are contained. Trudgill (1999) does use the concept of the ‘dialect area’ in order usefully to discuss basic feature distributions in an elementary book, and the impression might be gained that such areas are a reality. That this is not so is manifest from the ‘mixing and fudging’ discussions in Chambers and Trudgill (1998) and Upton (1995). A critique of the whole dialect area concept is to be found in Davis et al. (1997). There are a few specialized isoglossic dialect maps relating to Irish English variation in Barry (1981). However, the Linguistic Survey of Scotland (Mather and Spietel 1975–86), which, as well as covering Scotland takes in Northern Ireland features and those in the extreme north of England, makes use of overlaying hachuring as a technique, and in doing so demonstrates the fuzziness of boundaries.

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Types of variation: pronunciation, vocabulary, and grammar

General overviews of aspects of modern speech variation are available at diVerent scholarly levels. Trudgill (1984) ranges especially widely in the essays of a variety of authorities, while Trudgill et al. (2005), which has an accompanying audio cassette, provides a most accessible summary of salient features of a wide range of vernacular dialects. For pronunciation only, a core text for information is the second volume of Wells (1982), in which all the British regions are treated in some detail. Foulkes and Docherty (1999), in addition to detailed descriptions of the accents of very many major urban centres of Britain, contains an exploration of a wide range of sociolinguistic issues attendant on modern dialectological preoccupations. Trudgill and Chambers (1991) provides papers by major practitioners on aspects of non-standard dialect grammar within Britain and beyond. Concentrating on both phonology and grammar, Kortmann et al. (2004) contains chapters on all regions; these are accompanied by a CD-Rom and website and form part of a series detailing accents and grammar of English world-wide. Also very wide-ranging globally is Cheshire (1991). Milroy and Gordon (2003) contains a wealth of instruction on the principles and practices of the discipline of sociolinguistics.

Additional to the material of the regionally-conceived Linguistic Survey of Scotland, many aspects of present-day and older Scots are detailed in papers in Corbett et al. (2003), where those by Macafee, Miller, and Stuart-Smith concentrate respectively on the vocabulary, grammar, and pronunciation of modern Scots. Other authoritative works on Scots and Scottish English include Romaine (1982), Go¨rlach (1985), and Fenton and MacDonald (1994). The Scottish National Dictionary (Grant and Murison 1931–76) is an essential tool for the student of the Scottish lexicon, for which see also Macafee (1994). Wide-ranging essays

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on Irish English are available in O Baoill (1985) and Kallen (1997), while Todd (1999) gives a most accessible overview of northern and southern varieties in the round. Filppula (1999) provides a quite comprehensive grammar of the varieties to be found in Ireland. Detailed study of the interaction of speech and social networks in Belfast, carried out in the 1970s by J. and L. Milroy, along with much else concerning social variation in English, is reported on most accessibly in Chambers (2003). Besides the work of Parry, also closely associated with the Survey of Anglo-Welsh Dialects is Penhallurick (1991); Coupland (1988) provides social dialectological insight into a very major variety of Welsh English. A wide range of such sociolinguistic commentary is available for varieties in England: among the most recent of these furnishing material for this chapter can be cited Kerswill and Williams (1999), Beal (2000), Watt and Tillotson (2001), and Watt (2002). The phenomenon dubbed ‘Estuary English’ (see further Chapter 13) is much discussed both in the media and some more serious forums: one of the most useful critiques among the latter is that of Przedlacka (2002). Information on the most modern form of Received Pronunciation, the social accent which is inevitably to be used as a touchstone from time to time in the description of other accents, is to be found in Upton et al. (2001).

12

ENGLISH AMONG THE

LANGUAGES

Richard W. Bailey

MULTILINGUALISM is, and has been, a normal part of social life for most people, both now and in the past. Modern multilinguals look with surprise on those who believe that a single language will serve them better than several,

and they can hardly imagine so isolated an existence as implied by one language or barely believe that monolinguals can be satisWed by talking to people identical, more or less, to themselves.

English is (and has been) one language among many, and this chapter introduces readers to some of the interactions between English and other languages, focusing on the period between the later Renaissance and modern English (although earlier aspects of this pattern of interaction will also be examined too). The ebb and Xow of enthusiasm for other languages within the anglophone community is a tale of profound cultural importance for this history of English. Yet both sides of the linguistic divide are important. In Britain, abroad has been seen as sometimes repugnant, sometimes frightening—‘that beastly abroad’, wrote one nineteenth-century novelist quoted by the OED. Mistrust and suspicion is not the exclusive property of English-speakers, however. English, as seen by those who did not acquire it as a mother tongue, has been characterized in an astonishing variety of ways: unimportant, invasive, empowering, destructive are among the words used to describe it.

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Colchester or renaissance CardiV. In all of these communities, a dynamic interaction among languages (and dialects) produced new forms of expression. In recognizing that the past is often like the present, we need to search backwards for evidence of this process of accommodation.

traversing language boundaries

Before written records became common, it is diYcult to discern just what balance among languages might have been struck in the early history of the British Isles. Place-names, as already indicated (see p. 325), can still attest the kinds of linguistic layering which often took place. London, for example, traces its own history into English from the Latin Londoninium, which is itself supposed to be based on a Celtic personal or tribal name, Londinos. The name of Weston super Mare on the Somerset coast reveals that the Latin-speakers who came there wanted to distinguish among Westons. This one overlooks the sea (and its Wnal element derives from Latin mare); Weston-under-Penyard in nearby Herefordshire lies under a hill (which bears a Welsh name). Chapters 2 and 3 have addressed the complex multilingualism of Anglo-Saxon England. Old English already had a word for the crucial social role of the translator—wealhstod—who stood at the interface of two languages; in Aelfric’s Life of King Oswold, King Oswold of Northumbria (bilingual in Gaelic and Northumbrian) is hence the wealhstod for the Gaelic-speaking Bishop Aidan of Scotland who was to convert the Northumbrians to Christianity (aided by the linguistic skills of the king himself). In Middle English too, as Chapters 3 and 4 have stressed, multilingualism remained a signiWcant fact about language use in Britain (even though, following the Norman Conquest, the individual language components of such multilingualism had decisively changed). DiVerent languages also clearly took on diVerent social values, and the linguistic situation was evidently far more complex than that later articulated in Sir Walter Scott’s Ivanhoe (1819). In that novel, the ‘boors and serfs’ use Germanic terms for the animals they tend (like deer, pig, and sheep), while the swaggering French use Romance words for the meat they ate after the slaughter (venison, pork, and mutton). In post-Conquest Britain, new words also emerged for those who mediated across the boundaries which languages could create: latimer (Wrst used in LaZamon’s Brut in the early thirteenth century), followed by translator (a1392), and later by drugeman (c1400 >dragoman). In early modern English still other terms were introduced for the bilingual facilitator: truchman (1485) and linguister (a1649).

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Fourteenth-century texts can often reveal a complex interface of languages. English, for example, could be directly embedded in Latin texts, particularly those prepared for the use of persons in religious orders who were Xuent in both languages. In many of these, the English selections included proverbs, asides, and expansive metaphors, as in the following example:

Iam dierum nesciunt quid et quomodo vellent habere formam vestimentorum suorum in eo quod habent vestimenta sua contra naturam, for-qwy it is a meruell to se a catt with two tallys, bot now a man or a woman will haue two talles, and yt is more meruell, for a woman wyll haue a tayll a-fore oV her scho and anoder byhynd oV hyr gone. A man wyll haue two qwellbarowys oV hys schowdyrs. Set certe Deus non sic creavit hominem set 5 adymaginem suam, et ipse not habet talia, scio.

(‘Nowadays they don’t know what and how they want to have the shape of their clothes, because they have clothes against [the law of] nature. For it is a marvel to see a cat with two tails, but now a man or woman will have two tails, and it is an even greater marvel, for a woman will have a tail in front of her shoe and another behind her gown. A man will have two wheelbarrows oV his shoulders. But surely God did not create man thus but rather in his own image, and he does not have such things as far as I know’.)

Here the rant about fashion—tails and barrows in lines 3, 4, and 5 are methods of cutting and piecing fabric—has a ‘low’ element which is, in fact, typical of these mixed-language texts. English is the ‘slangy’ language; Latin is the vehicle for serious business. Two other English insertions in this sermon quote a tapster and a glutton. In both cases, English is the language of silliness and sin.

Fifteenth-century account books kept for London Bridge similarly show a fully integrated mixture of English, Latin, and French. Business records of this sort were often composed in this way.

It ‘Thome Mede Pyle dryver opant’ in quadrando scindendo & dirigendo lez pyles hoc a8 inWx in opibz aquaticis pro defensione Xuxus & reXuxus aquae ab opibz lapideis tam circa peram noui turris lapidei versus Wnem australem pontis’ hoc anno circu¯lus’ cum piles qam in diu’s alijs locis . . .

(‘And to Thomas Mede piledriver working in squaring cutting and guiding the piles this year Wxed in the water works for defence of the stone work from the ebb and Xow of the water both around the pier of the new stone tower towards the southern end of the bridge encircled this year with piles and in diverse other places’.)

This entry, made in 1471–2, invites speculation that its three languages were in use along the Thames, not just by clerks who kept the accounts but also by mariners and other workers who communicated with each other across linguistic boundaries.